So on with Google's new Caffeine search engine, it's been talked about for a while now, it's had a public testing sandbox where you could go perform searches and compare how it did against the original, typically it was way faster and the number of pages indexed would be greater.

For sites that we have optimized and continue to work with the result rankings were consistent, sometimes as shift of a few spots up or down, and on a few occasions significant jumps in the ratings - we attribute this to the fact that depsite a different engine Google still wants the same thing from the sites it indexes at the top - High Quality, Relevant, Desirable information relating to the term being searched - if you optimize with this in mind you have nothing to fear from major search engine changes - those of you who try to find clever cheats well you may find yourself dropping off into the back pages or completely out of the results at all, and rightfully so. This accounts for some of the few major jumps we saw during our testing of chrome.

So the point is this, this morning I did  a test search for one of my sites using the most competitive keywords for it - typically we are bouncing between 6th and 14th for this term out of 6,000,000 results. Being in Canada, I usually perform my first search on Google.ca, as it is the most pertinent for my targeted audience, followed by searching on Google.com the results were massively different, in fact very similar to the last Caffeine tests I had run. 

Today on Google.ca a term that previously had been ranked 6-14 depending on the day out of 6 million returns was ranked 7th out of 32.1 million results and the search seemed to complete even faster than normal, on Google.com the site fell back a bit to 10th place but it was out of 289 million results, this left me suspicious and sent me to Google's Caffeine Sandbox to which I found that it had been closed, with Google stating it's thank you's to the testers and announced they were implementing Caffeine into one of their Data Centers to cater to a larger number of people.

Make no mistake in understanding this - effectively today, while you may not know it Google Caffeine is the engine powering live searches on multiple regional Google engines.

If you see inconsistent returns throughout the next while understand that you may be hitting different data centers with your searches typically the ones that return the most results quickly is going to be Caffeine and should be indicative of where your site new ranking